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After my recent post explicating my stance on abortion, my resultant written scuffle with an anti-American (my term for pro-forced-birth types), and L’s post on why anti-abortion measures amount to terrorism aimed at limiting women’s freedom, I got to thinking about the various kinds of terrorism women face every day, and the result was this blog series. As such, it’s only proper that I dedicate a post to the people who inspired the whole War on Terr’r (and the most unapologetic and unrepentant terrorists women may ever face) in the first place, those anti-American types that would use terroristic tactics to subvert the law of the land and restrict women’s freedom in the most fundamental of ways.

L sums the essence of anti-American activity up as:

… violence against women to prevent them from caring for themselves, to restrict their identities to baby-makers, to limit the choices and amount of agency they have, to ignore the contexts of their lives for the potential life of the cell-clusters inside them…

Which means that anti-choicers are terrorists, does it not? Their activities aim to make use of fear to manipulate women’s behavior, whether that fear be of harassment, humiliation, or state intervention in the form of laws restricting women’s reproductive rights. If that isn’t terrorism, then Lou Dobbs loves Mexicans.

I think I ought to start by analyzing the motives of anti-Americans (although, being a freedom-loving patriot myself, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to make complete sense of such a freedom-hating ideology as theirs). The fundamental difference between anti-Americans and patriots such as myself is our conception (ha!) of when life begins. They claim it begins at the moment when sperm and egg form a zygote, and I say it’s at birth. They may argue that a zygote is a life because god says so, or because “science” defines life as:

… the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally.

In either case, they’re wrong.

First of all, it’s 2008. That we’re making ANY decision based on the fabricated anecdotes of dudes who lived in huts in the desert 2000+ years ago is pretty embarrassing. I’ve gotten in trouble with one anti-American for referring to religious beliefs as inherently anti-logical, but I stand by that statement and here’s why: if a belief is logical, we needn’t worry about having faith in it. Believing that the Bible is a book, for example, is something we can all logically infer from empirical evidence. Believing that it is the divine Word of some deific Dude in Sandals, on the other hand, requires us to believe, sans evidence, something that goes far beyond what we can directly observe. I’d like to think that these JC-loving types are just an advanced species of humans that have transcended positivist thinking (Comte is so outdated, man) and moved on to some more interesting and flexible thought system, but I suspect that the opposite is true and that they’ve yet to make it into the Enlightenment mentally (serious theologians, meaning those who have the capacity to debate these things intelligently and openly, notwithstanding).

The argument that “science” says that a zygote is a life and that science is thus on the side of anti-Americans is also utter horseshit. By using that definition I quoted above as proof that a fetus is a “life,” anti-Americans are opening themselves up to some serious counterarguments. First, if we are supposed to respect the integrity of every “life” under that definition, we’re all going to starve to death. Unless they can live on rocks and dirt, anti-Americans are going to need to come up with a better endorsement from “science.” Second, despite the fact that scientists may say that life can be defined as the opposite of death, the scientific community is hardly backing the anti-American position on abortion en masse. Honestly, aside from the few token “scientific” yes-men that these people seem to be able to produce, very few scientists are anti-abortion, and those who are usually base their position on their religious views rather than their scientific knowledge. The reason they do so is that, as any scientist must admit, they cannot refer to a fetus as a viable individual animal until such a time as that fetus can live on its own outside of its mother’s body. A zygote, while it is a living organism, is not yet a human being. As such, it technically fits the definition of “life,” but such a definition would also include any living thing, be it an amoeba, a donkey, a capybara, or a rutabaga. Either these anti-Americans start making dirt burgers, or they’re going to have to find a new way to mischaracterize the conclusions of secular authorities to promote their own illogical stance.

Luckily most anti-Americans have god to fall back on, because the science argument is obviously pretty lame. If you bring god into the picture, you can say that a human zygote is more important than the other kinds of “life,” because a human zygote has a soul as soon as god stretches his sparkly finger down from the heavens and touches a woman on the belly. It may be irrational, but it seems to work for them.

You hear a lot of arguments from these people about the potential of the fetus. What if that baby was going to grow up to save the world? What if that baby was going to become a firefighter or a doctor or a DJ and save your life in the future? What if Jesus was aborted!?!? Ahem. I’m pretty sure that people elect to have abortions in cases where they aren’t emotionally or financially prepared to become parents. Know what kind of parents those people usually make? Shitty ones. That means it isn’t likely their kids are going to grow up to be superheroes (DJs, maybe), but rather regular people with regular people’s problems and limitations. So, really, the “potential” argument ought to be reworded: “You may be aborting a future Sandwich Artist!”. As for what would have been the case had Jesus been aborted, I’m going to have to call the bluff of the anti-Americans: I say we’d be better off because we wouldn’t have to deal with the legacy of 2000+ years of people believing in shit that doesn’t exist, which tends to lay down some serious obstacles on the path to human progress, especially for women.

Sometimes these anti-American types let the mask slip and make a comment that clues us in to their real, albeit possibly unexamined, reason for wanting to restrict women’s access to safe health care. They just can’t stand the idea that a woman would be out behaving irresponsibly and using abortions as birth control. That’s a serious red herring, no?

I often wonder if the arguments these people provide in defense of their policy proposals aren’t a cover for their belief, conscious or unconscious, that women who have sex ought to suffer some kind of consequence. Actually, I don’t wonder. I’m fairly positive that the entirety of the anti-American movement operates from a subconscious belief in exactly that, which is evident in the logical weakness of their arguments and in the desperate appeal to “morality” they turn to when their logic is shown to be faulty (“But why should we let loose and irresponsible women use abortion as birth control?”). Mind you, I’m not saying that these guys* are consciously deciding that women who have sex are whores deserving of punishment, but that the idea has been implanted into their psyches by religion and by a society with a schizophrenic conception of sexuality and morality, and that this idea has been reinforced by their own shadowy understanding of their own societal and sexual privilege. You see, men have a vested interest, whether they are conscious of it or not, in maintaining control over women’s sexuality. When female sexuality is subordinated to and defined by male sexuality, men get to decide what sex is and how it should be done. Women hosing around wantonly is a pretty serious threat to that privilege, as well as several others that have been well documented by more impressive thinkers than me (I suppose those exist), and is therefore something to be feared and suppressed.

You know what’s not a threat to the privileges men reap from controlling women’s sexuality? Fetuses. I don’t know whether any of these anti-Americans are self-aware enough to have said this out loud or thought it in explicit terms, but the underlying sentiment in the pro-forced-birth movement is, “If we privilege fetuses, we can control women!”

Fear breeds fanaticism and hatred. White guys who were afraid of losing their privileged position after the Reconstruction stepped up their violence against blacks, men afraid of losing their privileged position in the workplace and the family are fueling the growth in the violent porn industry, you get the idea. Nothing motivates repression like the threat of equality, and nothing would contribute more to women’s equality than actual sexual freedom (and by that I do NOT mean the internalization and regurgitation of misogynistic male fantasy that is the sex industry). Therefore, the most obvious forms of terrorism women face tend to revolve around women’s sexual freedom and autonomy, as women’s sexual freedom is seen as a direct threat to the patriarchal order.

Terrorism is often the tactic of a minority when faced with a majority juggernaut. It’s the weapon of the desperate, calculated to create maximum results through the use of fear. If anti-Americans can do something shocking enough, they reckon, they can keep women from exercising their freedom to decide what to do with their own bodies, no matter what the majority of the people want, and no matter what the law says. If they bomb a clinic, they not only kill a doctor who is willing to support women’s freedom, but they also use fear to manipulate other doctors who are willing to support women’s freedom and to manipulate women who are considering going to a women’s health care provider, whether for an abortion or not. When they picket a clinic, they plan to create fear in the minds of women considering abortion as well as those who arrive at the clinic to have one; they hope that the specter of the emotional trauma and humiliation they intend to inflict will be enough to dissuade a woman from exercising her right to decide her own destiny.

But those are just the most visible of their tactics. Many anti-Americans quietly and insidiously focus their efforts on the legal system. For now, women have the right to decide what to do with their own bodies, and that right is guaranteed by the Supreme Court’s decision, which is still (despite what the president thinks) the last word on the law in this country. But that doesn’t mean these motherfuckers can’t and don’t weasel around the court’s decision and terrorize women in small and not-so-small ways. They’ve managed to restrict women’s access to procedures they are guaranteed the right to seek out by pushing state laws that restrict those rights in various ways. They force minors to notify their parents or the father, they force women to sit through anti-American propaganda lectures before they are allowed to receive medical treatment, they attempt to unseal the private medical records of women who have had abortions, and so on ad nauseum and infinitum. All of these are terrorist tactics meant to create fear and to thereby manipulate women into giving up their freedom of self-determination.

Well, fuck that. They’re terrorists and they deserve to be treated like terrorists, whatever that means to you. If that means throwing ground beef at them, do it. If that means getting out your Super Soaker full of piss and doing a Boyz in the Hood on them, sweet. If it means breaking their signs and screaming at them, spitting on them, throwing eggs at them, calling them anti-American traitors, or anything else, right on. When some asshole puts a sticker on his car admonishing you to think of it as a “child, not a choice,” feel free to vandalize his car, or to cover that sticker up with a sticker of your own choosing with some sort of feminist (ideally pro-abortion) message. When someone approaches you in front of the grocery store with a petition that would limit women’s reproductive rights, take their petitions and tear them up. Tell them that these colors don’t run, and make it known to your elected officials that you consider these people to be anti-freedom, anti-American terrorists, and that you won’t be voting for any appeasers.

The key is to make it not worth the hassle for them, because that’s exactly what they hope to do. They think if they’re obnoxious enough, we’ll give up and acquiesce to their terroristic demands. We just have to be more determined to protect our freedoms than the terrorists are to take them away.

* Another note: We all know it’s easier to become an appeaser than it is to resist patriarchy and run the risk of calling an act of terrorism down on oneself, and that it’s almost impossible to resist internalizing patriarchal values, so it’s no surprise that anti-Americans have been able to recruit women into their anti-woman movement.

27 Responses to “The War on Terr’r Part 4: Fetal Privilege”

It seems that the establishment of equality will be a very tricky thing to do. For it is much harder to create the conditions necessary in order for a state of equality to occur naturally, than it is to plan and impose an artificial “equality” upon society, thus inadvertently becoming an oppressor.

I just read this post and your other abortion post that you linked to, and I have a question. You mentioned a couple of times something about women not using abortion as birth control. Some commenters on the other post brought that up too, as in “abortion should be legal, but shouldn’t be used as birth control.”

This has always confused me. What is abortion if it isn’t birth control? I mean, I totally consider it to be birth control. I can’t use the pill and I don’t want an IUD. I’m allergic to spermicide and latex irritates me. So my partner and I use FAM and I keep a plan B in the medicine cabinet…but if I get pregnant I will likely abort, since this isn’t a good time for me to have another baby.

I’ve never understood the attitude that it’s ok for women to have an abortion if they were raped, or they were on the pill and it failed, or whatev – but it’s not ok for women to have two or three or more abortions. That’s just irresponsible! Either it’s ok, or it’s not ok. I don’t get why it becomes less ok the more a person does it…that stinks of moralizing.

bottlecapie – I agree with you completely. I’m saying the other side says it isn’t OK to use abortion as birth control (I wrote a whole paragraph about how that shows that they’re really about punishing women for having sex rather than protecting the supposed “rights” of a fetus). I said in a comment on the other blog that in an ideal world we’d have free, simple, and non-humiliating access to birth control, which I think would cut down on the need for abortion. Still, I don’t oppose its use as a form of birth control, I just think it’s one of the more painful and inconvenient methods and ought to be a last resort, for the health and safety of the mother if nothing else.

But I think I know why you might have taken that bit in the post to be my opinion; when I pasted this in here I forgot to format it and the bits I meant to be in italics weren’t. I think if you look at it now my sarcasm will be a bit more detectable.

purple-orange – Let me say this one more time: your arguments are tautological and repetitive, and hence boring. I’m not posting them anymore. Stop wasting your effort. Also, go look up the definition of “satire.” If you can’t tell I’m using patriotism and terrorism in a tongue-in-cheek way, you’re a fool.

Hard-core vegans kill and EAT carrots! Carrots are life, because it is a scientific fact that life begins are germination! Carrot cake is MURDER!

Ok, enough with the silliness. The pro-life movement is actually ‘pro-human life’, and when they say life begins at conception they actually mean “human life” begins at conception (because all biologists will tell you that sperm and ova are still living cells).

I’d like to inquire at what stage of birth you believe that “human life” begins. Is it when the baby’s brain is outside the woman, or fully out of the woman, or when the umbilical cord is cut? Myself, I can’t see how the position of a baby or the status of its physical connection to another being are morally relevant.

(note, I’m not a pro-lifer, I’m actually of the opinion that “human life” begins after birth)

I say it begins at birth. I suppose I’d say that means when the fetus is outside of the woman’s body with the cord cut. Until then it’s dependent on her for its life, which I do think is morally relevant.

N.D., I really appreciate your essay and totally agree with you. You are able to put into words the things I try to say, but end up saying, “But… um… Wait!…. I mean…” instead. Thank you for your bravery and your eloquence.

If a newborn was depending on being connected to her mother, then cutting the umbilical cord would kill the child. Seeing as it does not, we must conclude that the infant is not depending on her mother’s life just at the time immediately preceding birth.

Even if the infant was depending on the mother for life, that doesn’t make the infant morally irrelevant. Consider another example: one conjoined twins may depend on the other for life, but that doesn’t make either of them less important. Also, a heart attack victim may be clinging onto life only because of a person performing CPR on them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t count and that the person can just walk away from performing CPR whenever they want. Having your life dependent on another lifeform or object seems morally irrelevant to the status of your life.

I don’t particularly care what has gone on between the time a woman goes into labor and the time the cord is cut, but until she goes into labor, she ought not be forced to continue a pregnancy she doesn’t want to. It’s when a “fetus” becomes a “baby” that I say a life has begun. In any case, I’m not calling a late-term fetus morally irrelevant (though I would earlier in the pregnancy), but I am saying that its “rights” ought not supersede those of the mother.

Joshua, it’s pointless debating with NineDeuce. From experience, she eventually portrays your opinion as derived from blind faith, scorns and then deletes any comments that seek to clarify your actual position.

To Nine Deuce, is it because my arguments are apparently repetitive that you delete my comments, or is it because I have exposed the severe flaws in your reasoning (or rather lack of). Indeed, it appears to be the latter as if it were the former then there would be no need to delete them. Indeed, if my arguments are repetitive, it is because I constantly need to restate them to clarify your incorrect assumptions and misconceptions.

purple-orange – Don’t go thinking you and Joshua are gonna be pals, because he isn’t anti-abortion.

In fact, I’ve been thinking about his last comment, and it helped me clarify my own opinion on some things. If you had anything similarly thought-provoking to offer, it would have the same effect, but you’ve yet to produce anything but hackneyed arguments about when a “life” begins, which I’ve disposed of in this post (which you’d know if you bothered to read it and pay attention instead of just thinking about your retort).

Despite your claims to the contrary, you have yet to point out any flaw in my logic, as anyone who reads our exchange can see. As soon as you do, I’ll let you know. Simply telling me that your reasoning is sound and that mine is flawed doesn’t make it so, no matter how many times you repeat yourself. I didn’t approve your comments because I am frankly bored with replying to the same 3 ridiculously myopic and disingenuous points over and over again. That and I am not obligated in any way to provide you with a forum and a readership to spout your short-sighted and simplistic ideology to. Write this down: this is MY website. YOU do not have a “right” to be heard here. If YOU want to be heard, start your own fucking blog. Otherwise, piss off.

I’m saying this once more, and then you’re officially banned: your position is antithetical to mine, we’ll never agree, and I’ll never be convinced by your faulty reasoning. I will never accept that a woman’s rights are less important than those of a fetus. Get that straight, and fuck off.

Regarding Joshua’s argument about conjoined twins – don’t doctors sometimes separate the twins, even knowing that one of them will surely die, in order to give the stronger twin a chance at a somewhat normal life? And I’m pretty sure that there is no legal obligation to give CPR to a heart-attack victim.

I’m not really sure what you’re trying to get at, unless you’re trying to say that late-term abortion is morally wrong or something. But late-term abortions are a tiny fraction of all abortions in the US, and they’re generally only performed if the mother’s life or health is at risk or if the fetus is inviable anyway.

Llordy.. wait.. lardy .. Now yer takin on abortion? You go, you could get the trains running on time if anyone could. I know you arent into personal, but maybe some folks cant separate personal from logical on stuff like abortion. Personally, I could never be a part of an abortion, my emotions would choke me up. I’d start my own kids school in the barn. But then I have to think twice about killing bugs, too many reincarnation theories in my background.

But to me I guess rationally abortion is no different than pulling the plug on Grandma if shes transitioned into a veggie state – these appear to be frontend/backend semi-life states that fall under the duty of those attempting to think on the planet to take responsibility and choice for.

Im not sure advocating vandalizing cars is the answer though. Violence begets more violence, what is accomplished? Sortof like when you called all those people who didnt agree with you asshats. I’ve always preferred argument over violence.

gare, wielding white male privilege the old fashioned way (ineptly at best)

gare – I never say “asshat.” I prefer asshole. You’re right about this being an emotional issue for people. It’s almost ill-advised to even try to discuss it, since it arouses so much anger and contention, as can be seen in the comments section of my last blog on the subject. I don’t know if anyone is actually going to vandalize anyone’s car, but I do encourage people to take concrete actions to convince anti-abortion types that they ought to stop trying to limit women’s rights.

Bottlecappie, you bring up an interesting point about the CPR, and I would like to clarify on this.

A person is able to control their own body, including whether they would like to donate a few minutes of their time to support someone else’s life with CPR. A woman should be able to control her own body, including whether she would like to be spend nine months of her life supporting a child.

However, the key distinction here, I believe, is that the embryo/foetus is not (yet) a person, whereas the victim of a heart attack very likely is. This means that the embryo or foetus (or, I think, neonate) doesn’t have the ability to care about whether it lives or dies, whereas the victim of the heart attack probably wants to keep living. Therefore, refusing to give your time to save a a life with CPR is probably morally wrong (though not legally wrong), but choosing to have an abortion is not.

I have never understood the “some (most) women just use abortion as birth control! oh, the horror!” argument. Um, duh. Abortion is *always* birth control, whether you have one or a dozen, you’re controlling birth, specifically keeping it from happening. I suppose people mean “regarding abortion as if it were the same as contraceptives,” however, I imagine very few women do.

I grow very weary of the “when does life begin argument.” Personally, I do think a fetus is alive. Yes, I think you’re killing a living thing. I also think that if a human being miniaturized himself/herself to the size of a fetus and attached himself/herself to your bloodstream because it’s the only way he/she can survive, you’d be in your rights to kill him/her. No one has the right to use your body without your consent, and given that sex is used by humans for bonding, pleasure and love and that the vast, vast majority of sex acts do not result in a child, no, simply having sex is not tacit consent to making a baby. Consenting to making a baby is consenting to making a baby, nothing else, and if a fetus is growing in you and you didn’t consent to have it there, yes, you have the right to protect yourself by removing it. If the only way to do that is to kill it, c’est la vie. We would be outraged (and in fact so would most anti-choicers) if we were told you cannot kill a person to save yourself from rape, or you cannot kill a person to save yourself from being beaten senseless by them, or you cannot kill a person to keep them from injecting you with a disease that could destroy your immune system, cause you great pain, and eventually hasten your death. We believe in killing when it is the only way to save yourself from imminent harm inflicted by another person, even if that person is innocent (say, a man with a mental age of 3 but the body of a grown adult is trying to rape you) To argue that you do not have the right to save yourself from the harm that a fetus can cause your body, as long as said fetus won’t kill you, is to argue that you can’t protect yourself from rape with lethal force even if that’s the only way, and it’s better to let yourself be raped than to take the rapist’s life.

How much damage does pregnancy usually cause to a woman? I have a hard time understanding this particular argument for abortion, as if pregnancy were the same thing as a disease, instead of a natural part of our life cycle.

I have to say, Nine Deuce and Joshua, while I do lean more towards the pro-life end of the argument, your arguments about ‘when is a fetus a person?’ are the first from a pro-choicer to actually make some damn sense to me. Usually people just say ‘when its born’ and leave it at that, which is not really adequate. Thank you for making me think.

When 95% of women who undergo childbirth experience (often unnecessary medical intervention, when up to 35% of women are being coerced into surgery to remove a full-term fetus from her uterus (otherwise known as caesarean section), when approximately 50% of women in the more ‘civilised’ countries in the world walk out of hospital with some sort of mental illness (ie Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or Post Natal Depression, even Post Partum Psychosis), when women are consigned to being babymakers at the expense of everything else that they are, desire, think, and would pursue – The answer to your question is – a damned LOT.

Pregnancy and childbirth ARE natural – but not when you place it in the domain of misoginyst (otherwise known as obstetricians) who view pregnant women as a comodity, and the pathologising of what is normal and natural as a gravy boat to big money. Its all too easy to manipulate pregnant and birthing women – not only is it a time of huge vulnerability emotionally and physically, but given that most women actually do have some strong attachment to the fetus growing inside them and want the best outcome – doctors all too often play the ‘dead baby’ card in order to coerce submission.

Pregnancy has the potential to absolutely, irrevocably fuck a woman’s life forever – and it happens a lot more often than we’re willing to admit. No woman should go into pregnancy unwillingly. No woman should go into labour uneducated, nor submissive, nor unsupported.

I’m pro-abortion, but I’d like to say that I do consider a fetus a humin life. It’s just that I think murder is okay in a lot of circumstances (don’t hate me). For example, you rape, you get to eat death. You touch kids, you get shot in the face. You listen to that disgusting misogynistic rape music crap that I’m not even going to tell you the name of because I don’t remember it and I think it’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard, I get to cut your balls off and feed them to you in a ball and strychnine pâté.

On to supposed “innocents”, do people really think that it’s okay to bring them up in a home where given the choice, the mother would have killed them? And I think that I would kill myself if I had to have a kid. I hate kids. They hate me. Is that the kind of environment you’d want these kids to grow up in? Listening to my crappy poetry and bitching and hating themselves until they one day lose it and just shoot themselves in the head? No. It’s kinder this way to allow people like me to not have children. Goddess bless America, or wherever else these people are from.

Fetal privilege, hmm. It’s time for some fun: when a group of people hold a few ridiculous ideas, I can’t always resist putting the ideas together and seeing where they lead. Disclaimer: I applaud hellonhairylegs’ above summary, and the following ideas are the object of my ridicule, so no, I don’t believe them.

So we have some assumptions:

1. Men are more privileged than women.
2. Fetuses are more privileged than their mothers–you know, they’re innocent, whereas the women have sinned and so on.
3. A person’s genitalia determine that person’s sex (and the person has to have the same gender and be heterosexual, oh, how the idiocy hurts me). You could say having XX or XY chromosomes is what makes the difference, but really, there must be more to it because we all know that the maleness of the XY-person depends on the size of the dick, and the the femaleness of the XX on the ratio of tits and ass to waist. Right?

Number 3 leads to:
4. A person is not a complete person without genitalia that are visibly male or female. Because without that, how would we know that person’s prescribed role as a human being? God forbid.

Then there is fact 5: before the ninth week of pregnancy, the genitals of the fetus are ambiguous. Correct me if my source is wrong.

The punch line: a fetus is not a person before the ninth week, so abortions until then are A-Okay for anti-Americans! Not much of a concession (except that it allows birth control), but I hope the reasons I gave make you laugh.

By the way, it’s worse than rocks and dirt; people who want to preserve all life at the cellular level have to prevent their own skin cells from falling off, and their stomach lining from its rapid cycle of divide-and-die, and so on.